There’s no question that the supply chain is a strategic asset for forward-thinking retailers and brand owners. Getting products from A to Z efficiently while maintaining a positive customer experience is a big balancing act that supply chain leaders deal with every day. So, how can your supply chain have an impact on customer satisfaction levels? How do successful companies view their supply chains and why is it worth investing in them? While the path to success may not be obvious, some recent research gives us some clues.

Top Supply Chains

Gartner, the world’s leading research and advisory company, recently released “The Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 List for 2018.” The names are familiar and perhaps not surprising. Among the top ten; Starbucks, H&M, Pepsico, Nestle, Nike, Intel, Colgate-Palmolive, Cisco Systems, Inditex and Unilever. Long established brands that seem like am obvious shoe-in, such as, for example, McDonald’s, eventually graduate to Hall of Fame status. (We could say more but Gartner policy prohibits paraphrasing.)

More importantly, Supply Chain Orchestration (SCO) is about designing and implementing a network that delivers the perfect balance between customer services and profitability. It is creating a network that is agile, fluid, and provides proactive and predictive insight into demand and supply.

A Competitive Advantage that Leads to Greater Earnings

In another survey, more than 600 market stakeholders in the Geodis 2017 Supply Chain Worldwide Survey viewed their supply chains as a competitive advantage, leading to greater earnings. They view supply chains as something worth investing in to achieve that competitive advantage. So what is the best way to “invest” in creating a superior supply chain?

Adopting Supply Chain Orchestration is an important next step in the evolution of an enterprise’s supply chain. The annual Deloitte and Touche MHI 2017 report of 1,100 manufacturing and supply chain executives from companies representing annual sales of $100+ million show that 80% believe the digital supply chain will be the dominant model within five years. A significant 16%, however, say that it is already happening today.

SCO gives you the flexibility to move between potential fulfillment routes and partners. When businesses have a fully configurable SCO system, they can automate order fulfillment and return handling based on predetermined specifications tuned for customer experience and cost. By safeguarding flexibility, organizations can seize fresh opportunities to maximize value creation.

One of the significant benefits of this configurable automation is that it can free up experienced employees to focus on exceptions that require greater attention. This enables an organization to implement higher standards, where no order is ever allowed to slip through the cracks. The most successful supply chains are using their data to generate insights and proactively mitigate potential issues.

Supply chain leaders are always looking for ways to optimize order flows, minimize inventory levels, lower transportation costs, and maximize value. Supply Chain Orchestration considers all of these seemingly outside factors, allowing companies to better anticipate and adjust to shifts in the market. These leaders tend to have higher levels of satisfaction because they take a holistic view of their service levels, the supply chains and the data analytics that help generate actionable predictive insights.

There is more data available to us than ever. Determining what is important, what to use, when, and how to use it will take us to the next level of Supply Chain Orchestration. Are you ready to conduct your masterpiece?